A Yanomami couple
will "groom" each
other [remove lice].

CHAPTER THREE: Myth and Cosmos

The Yanomami are a tribal group that lives in territory in Southern Venezuela and Northern Brazil.  There are dozens of villages.  The villages often engage in warfare, or to be more precise, raids on each other.  The purpose of the raids is usually to kill the men and capture women.  The explicit explanations that they give for these raids vary, but revenge is a frequent one.  Napoleon Chagnon's original edition of his book on the Yanomami was subtitled "The Fierce People," the name that the Yanomami gave themselves.  It is not clear that they are any fiercer than other primitive people.  But it may be good to advertise oneself as fierce if that reputation inhibits other villages from attacking. The following are excerpts from the third chapter.  [There are a few more notes like these at the end of the selection.]

Chagnon refers to the stories of the Yanomami as "myths," which is a useful name for them.  Later you will see ch. 2 in the textbook distinguish between "folktales" and "grand myths."  The former are shorter, with simpler plots.  The latter are a result of literacy -- which allows for much more complex plotting. [Chagnon here perpetuates another kind of 'myth' -- that navigators in the days of Columbus and Magellan thought the earth was flat.]

The highest layer of the Yanomami cosmos is "void."  And they do not take the idea of hell very seriously.  It is possible that both of these ideas are not part of older Yanomami lore but are half-hearted variations on Christian beliefs that have seeped into the forest from missionaries.

As you read, once again ask yourself whether the ideas about the spirits and about life after death, as well as the use of magic add up to what you would call religion.

Excerpts from pages 116-141 of Chagnon:

The Cosmos

The illustration entitled "The Yanomamö Cosmos" depicts four parallel layers, lying horizontally and separated by an undefined but relatively small space. The layers of this cosmos are something like inverted dinner platters – gently curved, round, thin, rigid, and with a top and bottom surface. The edges of some of the layers are thought to be "rotten" and rather fragile, as if to walk on them might be like walking on the roof a deteriorating building where your feet periodically sink through. Many magical things happen out in this region, a mysterious and dangerous netherland dominated by spirits. The best geographers and sailors in our own recent historical past had conceptions not markedly different. Magellan was mightily relieved when his ships didn’t fall of the edge of the supposedly flat earth some 475 years ago.

The uppermost layer of the four (there might be more, according to some Yanomamö) is thought to be "pristine" or "tender": duku kä misi. At present this layer is void (broke), but many things originated there in the distant past – in the Yanomamö cosmos, things tend to fall or descend downward to a lower layer. Sometimes the uppermost layer is described by the term "old women," like the abandoned, nonproducing gardens. This layer does not play much role in the everyday life or thoughts of the Yanomamö, not even in their shamanism or myths. It is just there, having once had some vague function.

The next layer down is called hedu kä misi, the sky layer. The top surface of hedu is invisible but is believed to be similar to earth – it has trees, gardens, villages, animals, plants, and, most important, the souls of the deceased Yanomamö, who are in some sense similar to mortals. They garden, hunt, make love, eat, and practice witchcraft on each other. Everything that exist on earth has its counterpart in hedu, as if hedu were a mirror image of human life.

The underneath surface of hedu is what we on earth actually see – the visible stars. Stars and planets are somehow attached to this surface and move across it on their individual trails, east to west. Some Yanomamö think that stars are fish, but their astronomical ideas are undeveloped and they have nothing that we would call named constellations. The underside of hedu is conceived to be relatively close to earth, for I was repeatedly asked if I bumped into it when I was in an airplane. (Airplanes were only rarely seen in 1964, when I began my fieldwork, for there were no airstrips in the upper Orinoco region at the time. Today planes and helicopters are commonly seen, even in the most remote villages.)

Humans – Yanomamö – dwell on what is called "this layer," or hei kä misi. "This layer" was created when a chunk of hedu broke off and fell down. As everyone can plainly see, "this layer" has jungle, rivers, hills, animals, plants, gardens, and so on, and is occupied by people who are slightly different variants of the Yanomamö and speak a dialect of Yanomamö that is "crooked," or wrong. Even the non-Yanomamö here (nabä or, in some dialects in Brazil, kraiwä) are believed to dwell in shabonos, for foreigners are thought to be nothing but degenerate copies of the real humans, the Yanomamö. In fact, the Yanomamö thought I was a reincarnated version of a Yanomamö, and they frequently asked if I had drowned and come back to life. The logic behind the question was that in one of their myths a great flood had occurred, and some Yanomamö had escaped drowning by grabbing onto logs. They floated downstream, were not seen again, and presumably had perished. But some are now returning, floating on logs (canoes), who look different and speak "crooked" – foreigners. A spirit named Omawä fished them out of the water downstream, wrung them out, bought them back to life, and is returning them home.

Finally, there is the surface below "this layer," the hei tä bebi, which is almost barren. A peculiar variant of Yanomamö live here, a people called Amahiri-teri. They originated a long time ago when a piece of hedu broke off, crashed down to "this layer," knocking a hole in it, and continued to fall. The piece hit "this layer" at the place where the Amahiri-teri lived and carried them and their village down with it. Unfortunately, only the garden and the shabono of the the Amahiri-teri were carried down, but not the jungle where they hunted. Thus, they have no game animals and have turned into cannibals. They send their spirits up to "this layer" to capture the souls of children, which are carried down and eaten. In some Yanomamö villages, the shamans contest regularly with the Amahiri-teri, attempting to thwart their cannibalistic incursions.

The Yanomamö have an almost morbid fear of becoming cannibals. It is almost as though they think humans are close to having an inherent predisposition to devour members of their own species, an act they find repugnant but a possibility that is very real to them and therefore must be constantly opposed. Whenever I was hunting with them and we shot tapir, I would cut off a thick juicy slice of tenderloin and fry myself a rare-cooked steak dripping with delicious red juice. This so disgusted the Yanomamö that they could not even watch me eat, and they would accuse me of wanting to become a cannibal or a jaguar, which to them is a disgusting eater of raw human flesh. For their part, they overcook their meat so badly that one can almost drive nails with it.

The Amahiri-teri lived at the time of the no badabö, the original humans. These original humans are distinct from living humans in that they were part spirit and part human, and most were also part animal – many of the myths explain how the transformation into humans occurred. When the original people died, they turned into spirits, or hekura. The term no badabö means "those who are now dead." In the context of myth and stories of the cosmos, it means "the original humans" or "those who were here in the beginning of time."

MYTHS THE BEGINNING OF TIME AND THE No Badabö

It is almost impossible for the Yanomamö to explain how the first beings were created. They seem to assume that the cosmos began with them already present. Most of the no badabö had specific roles in the creative events that transpired after they were in existence -- events that, for example, explain the origin of certain animals or plants. The no badabö figure predominantly in these myths, and many bear the names of plants and animals, both useful ones and those of little consequence. The no badabö are the spirits of these living things, although there is little correlation between the mythical importance of some of the spirits and the usefulness of the plant or animal whose name they bear.

Some of the characters in Yanomamö myths are downright hilarious, and some of the things they have done are funny, ribald, and extremely entertaining to the Yanomamö. They love to listen to the men telling stories as they prance around the village, "tripping out" on their hallucinogens and adding comical twists and nuances, to the sidesplitting delight of the audience. Everybody knows, for example, how Iwäriwä (Caiman Ancestor) was tricked into sharing his fire with everyone – an obscene act made him laugh, and the fire escaped from his mouth. That part of the story cannot be changed. But the description of the act, what gestures and comments he make, his tone of voice, and other details are subject to considerable poetic license, and it is this that entertains and amuses the listener. Occasionally an inspired narrator will go beyond what is acceptable, a violation that his own villagers might good-naturedly forgive but that people in another village might not. I realized this when I tape-recorded some of the narratives and invited people in other villages to comment on them. "He’s got it wrong. He’s lying. It wasn’t that way at all," they would complain, adding that if I wanted the Truth I should ask them. Usually the degree of objection was related to the degree of contempt they held for the other village – war and the orthodoxy of myth run on parallel lines. Most of it was simple ethnocentrism and chauvinism: nobody does anything as well as "my people," a sentiment all people exhibit to some degree.

With a filmmaking colleague, Timothy Asch, I have produced several films that record the telling of specific myths and the variants of some of them. The films capture something of the humor and wit of the storyteller, not to mention the humorous content of the myths themselves. They also reveal the high dramaturgical skills of a storyteller like Kaobawä and illustrate how different the impact of a documentary film is, as compared to the written word. It would be very difficult to capture the humor, subtlety, and wittiness of Yanomamö myths without using motion-picture film, a distortion of reality no more severe than writing the myths down on paper. Advocates of the latter are sometimes too quick to criticize the use of film as a distortion. While we have filmed a large number of myths, only a few of them have been included in final films as yet. I am therefore focusing here on themes and stories that are not available in the finished films.

Sex plays a large part in Yanomamö myths – general relationships between men and women, on the one hand, and their biological attributes, on the other. Sex is also an important part of everyday life among the Yanomamö, as it is elsewhere, and much of their humor, insults, fighting, storytelling, and conceptions about humans revolves around sexual themes. If I were to illustrate the dictionary I have been patiently compiling on my field trips, it would be, as one of my graduate students once commented, very good pornography. The Eskimos are said to have thousands of words for snow, the point being that a culture’s vocabulary often reflects what is important in that culture, and one would expect the Eskimos to have a lot of words for snow. The Yanomamö, of course, have no word for snow, but if one had a dictionary of the Yanomamö language, one would have no difficulty concluding sex is their equivalent of snow.

The stories of the no badabö provide a good sampling of the wit, humor, and themes of the Yanomamö intellectual life. Some of the stories seem to have morals or lessons, and others purport to explain or justify why things are as they are in the real Yanomamö world today. Still others seem to have no discernible point, such as the simple story of the Armadillo Ancestor and the Jaguar Ancestor exchanging their sets of teeth, which reverses their roles and original natures.

One of the themes that crops up regularly has to do with relations between men and women. The Yanomamö consider men not only different from women but superior to them in some regards – an idea that is not unique to the Yanomamö. And, as is sometimes found in myths of other peoples, a peculiar intellectual struggle is implicit in such myths. 

* * * *

One of the Yanomamö myths on the creation – the story of Moonblood – is itself ambiguous, for some Yanomamö claim that only men were created, and others say that both men and women were. In the Moonblood story, one of the Ancestors shot Moon in the belly. His blood fell to the earth and changed into men, but men who were inherently waiteri, or fierce. Where the blood was the thickest, the men were especially ferocious and nearly exterminated each other. Where only droplets of blood fell or where the blood became mixed with water, the men fought less and did not kill each other – that is, their inherent violence seemed to be more controllable. Because of Moon’s blood, however, all humans are waiteri. The "time of Moonblood" is a phrase the Yanomamö frequently use to indicate something like "the beginning of time." In collecting genealogies, I would eventually get to the most distant ancestor known to my informant, and further questioning would often be met by the answer: "Whaa! Those people lived at the time of Moonblood," or too far in the past for anyone to know.

Those Yanomamö who maintain that only males came from the blood of Moon say that females came from a kind of fruit called wabu. The males created by Moon’s blood having no women with whom to copulate, were very horny. They went out collecting vines one day, and as they were pulling them from the trees the headman noticed that one of the vines had a newly opened wabu fruit attached to it. The fruit had what appeared to be eyes.. The headman though to himself, "Ummm, I’ll bet that’s what women looks like," and he tossed the fruit to the ground. It changed immediately into a woman, who developed a large vagina. The men continued collecting vines, not aware that the fruit had turned into a woman. As they dragged the vines home, the woman, keeping her distance, would step on the ends of the vines whenever she caught the men off guard, but would hide behind a tree when they turned around to look. Finally she stood on one of the vines, bringing the men to a halt. They turned and saw her. They were startled to see that she had a vagina – a long and extremely hairy (weshi) one. They stared at it and were overcome with lust. They rushed to her, and all took a turn at copulating frantically with her. They brought her back to the village and let all the men there have a turn. Eventually, she had a baby – a daughter – and then another and another. As the daughters came out, all the men copulated with them, and eventually there was an abundance of females, all descended from the wabu fruit. And that is why there are so many Yanomamö today.

* * * *

SPIRITS AND DRUGS: THE WAR FOR THE SOUL

Yanomamö concepts of the soul are elaborate and sophisticated. The true, or central, part of the soul is the will, the buhii. At death, this turns into the no borebo, which escapes up the person’s hammock ropes and rises to the next layer of the cosmos. When it reaches that upper layer, it follows a trail until it comes to a fork. There, the son of Yaru (Thunder), a spirit named Wadawadariwa, asks the soul if it comes from a person who has been generous or stingy during mortal life. If the person has been stingy, Wadawadariwa directs the soul along one path, leading to a place of fire: Shobari Waka. If the person was generous, the soul is directed along the other path–to hedu proper, where a tranquil semimortal existence ensues.

The Yanomamo do not take this very seriously–that is, they do not fear the possibility of being sent to the place of fire. When I asked why, I was told, "Well, Wadawadariwa is kind of stupid. We’ll just all lie and tell him we were generous, and he’ll send us to hedu." I suppose, if they are ever Christianized, they will have the same attitude toward Saint Peter. Another portion of the soul, the no uhudi or bore, is said to be released during cremation. It wanders around on earth and lives in the jungle. Some Yanomamo claim that children always change into no uhudi and do not have a no borebo because their wills (buhii) are mohode–innocent, unaware. It would appear that to them the soul experiences an ontogeny paralleling human development, that a certain amount of living has to occur before parts of the soul develop. Some of the wandering bores are malevolent and attack travelers in the jungle at night; they have bright glowing eyes and beat the mortals with clubs and sticks. In 1968, I took Rerebawa to Caracas for a few days–a hilarious but informative experience for him–and he saw automobiles for the first time. As we drove along at night, the oncoming cars with their bright headlights terrified him. He thought they were a constant stream of bore spirits rushing past him at an incredible speed.

The most critical component of the soul is known as the moamo and lies inside the thoracic cavity, near (perhaps inside) the liver. This portion can be lured out and stolen, and it is very vulnerable to supernatural attack if removed from the body. A person who has lost his or her moamo will sicken and die, and the daily shamanistic attacks during the illness are usually directed at the moamo portions of the souls of the sick one’s enemies, or are directed toward recovering this soul and returning it to its owner.

In addition to their multifaceted souls, all Yanomamö individuals have an animal counterpart, an alter ego known as the noreshi. It is a dual concept, for the noreshi is both an animal that lives in the forest and an aspect or component of the person’s body or psyche. It is possible for people to lose their noreshis.

A male inherits his noreshi from his father, while a female inherits hers from her mother. Male noreshis are said to "go above" and female noreshis are said to "go below." Thus, certain monkeys and hawks found in high places are male noreshi animals, whereas snakes and ground-dwelling creatures are female noreshi animals, which travel low–a sexual superior/inferior equation. Kaobawa, for example has the black spider monkey, basho, as his alter ego, which he and all his brothers inherited from their father. "We are of the basho mashi," they would say–of the lineage of the spider monkey. Bahimi, Kaobawa’s wife, has the hiima, the dog, as her mashi, which she and her sister inherited from their mother. This up/down, superior/inferior, male/female duality occurs in other contexts, including very mundane ones. Men tie their hammocks high, and women sleep in hammocks below them; when the campfire gets low, a man dangles a foot over the edge of his hammock and nudges his wife, who grunts and sleepily throws another piece of wood on the fire.

Noreshi animals duplicate the lives of their human counterparts. When Kaobawa or Rerebawa goes hunting, so does his noreshi animal. When they sleep, so do their noreshis. If they get sick, the noreshis do, too. A two-day trip for the man is a two-day trip for the noreshi.

While humans and their noreshis theoretically live far apart and never come into contact, it is said that misfortunes occasionally occur, as when a hunter accidentally shoots and kills his own noreshi–and thus dies himself. Moreover, if another hunter kills a man’s noreshi, the man dies. In a sense the hunting of game animals is akin to the hunting and killing of humans, for some of the animals are the noreshi of humans.

The close association the Yanomamö make between loss of the soul and sickness is best exemplified in the shamanistic practices of the men. Those who are shamans spend several hours each day chanting to their tiny hekura spirits, enjoining them either to attack the souls of enemies or to help recover souls that people in the village have lost. It is a constant battle, and the men take their hallucinogenic snuff–ebene–daily to do contest with their enemies through the agency of their personal hekura.

But apparently not all aspects of the soul are equally vulnerable. For example, when I showed the Yanomamö pictures of themselves or others, they called the photographs noreshi. Tape recordings, though, were no uhudi. They seemed, at first, quite anxious over photographs and cameras and were very annoyed by my photographic attempts in the beginning. They would throw dirt and stones at me and, on one occasion, threatened to club me with red-hot firebrands grabbed from the hearth. After about a year, however, they pretty much ignored the cameras, except for a grumble or two from time to time. But they never objected to hearing tape recordings of their own voices. In fact, they liked them so much that they would make me play them back over and over again.

Anthropologists distinguish between two kinds of cannibalism: the eating of people who are not members of one’s group, or exocannibalism, and the eating of one’s own people, or endocannibalism. Neither form requires that the whole body be consumed, and, in fact, most cannibalism entails the consumption only of selected parts. Most documented cases of cannibalism, except in such extreme circumstances as the infamous Donner incident of our own pioneer days, indicate that it is highly ritualistic and occurs for religious or mystical reasons. Advocates of the protein theory have argued that the cannibalism widespread among some peoples, such as the Aztecs, was a response to an acute protein shortage. My response to that argument centers on the ultimate explanation, the function, of a hypothetical event. For example, a valiant warrior overcomes his equally valiant enemy in a mortal hand-to-hand contest. In celebration of his victory, he rips out his enemy’s heart and ritually devours a portion of it, to honor the enemy and perhaps also to acquire some of his valor. Is the triumphant warrior short of protein, or is he, more logically, performing a symbolic gesture? Perhaps the best way to drive home the argument is to ask whether the taking of Holy Communion in the Christian religion is evidence of a calorie shortage or is a symbolic, mystical–and ritually cannibalistic–act of eating the body and drinking the blood of a man called Jesus Christ. Holy Communion falls in a special category of cannibalism called theophagy, or the eating of gods, and it makes little sense if explained in terms of calorie or protein shortages. The same is true of most anthropophagy–the eating of humans.

The Yanomamö are endocannibalistic anthropophagers–a mouthful in both senses. They eat portions of their own deceased: the ashes and ground up bones that are left after a body is cremated.

When someone dies, say an adult, his or her body is carried to the clearing in the village and placed on a pile of firewood. More wood is stacked up around and on top of the body, and the fire is ignited. Children and those who are ill are sent away from the village, for the smoke from the burning corpse can contaminate them. The men often wash their bows and arrows after a cremation, to rid them of contamination, and I once saw the villagers wash all the smoked meat their hunters had brought back for a feast. Someone attends the fire to make sure the body is entirely burned, especially the liver. If the liver does not burn well, it is taken as a sign that the person committed incest during his or her life.

When the ashes have cooled, they are carefully and solemnly sifted. The unburned bones and teeth are picked out and placed in a hollowed-out log especially prepared for the occasion. A close kinsman or close friend of the deceased then pulverizes the bones by grinding them with a short stout pole about five feet long. This powder is carefully poured onto a leaf and transferred to several small gourds, each with a small opening. The dust and ash that remain in the hollow log are rinsed out with boiled ripe-plantain soup and solemnly drunk as the assembled relatives and friends mourn loudly and wildly, rending their hair with their hands and weeping profusely. The log is then burned. The ash remains are often obliquely referred to as madohe, a word meaning "possessions," or in this context "human remains." The gourds containing the ashes are carefully and tenderly stored in the roof of the kin’s house, after being plugged shut with white down, and are saver for another, more elaborate ash-drinking ceremony, which might be attended by kin from distant villages. At this second ceremony, large quantities of boiled rip-plantain soup are made and the ashes are poured into gourds full of the soup. The gourds are passed around among the close kin and friends of the deceased, who solemnly drink while the onlookers weep and mourn. A joyous feast follows.

Children’s corpses produce much less ash and bone, of course, and their remains usually are consumed by the parents alone. Important adults who have many kin and many friends get more elaborate ceremonies, with many people partaking of their ashes. Normally, all the remains are consumed in a single ritual. However, men who have been killed by enemy raiders are treated in a special fashion. Only the women drink their ashes, and they do so on the eve of a revenge raid. Thus, the ashes of a man who has been killed by his enemies may remain in his village for several years until his kin feel that his death has finally been avenged. One prominent man I knew, the headman of his village, was killed by raiders in 1965. (The full story is told in chapter 6.) Ten years later, the gourds containing his ashes were still in the rafters of his brother’s house, and his group continued to raid the villagers who had killed him–despite the fact that they had already killed several men in revenge.

If many people die at one time, as during an epidemic, their bodies, wrapped in bark and wood, are taken into the jungle and placed in trees. After the bodies have decomposed, any remaining flesh is scraped from the bones, the bones are burned, and the ashes are stored in gourds, to be drunk later.

Finally, as the myth of misi [a fabled turtle who managed to kill a jaguar, the most feared of jungle animals ] suggested, some prized pets are cremated, especially good hunting dogs, but the bones are buried afterward, not eaten. The bodies of ordinary dogs are discarded a short distance from the shabono, sometimes even before the dog is dead.

Shamans, Hekura, and Drugs

The word shaman comes from the language of a Siberian tribe, the Chuckchee, and has been widely applied to the men and women of any tribal society who manipulate the spirit world, cure the sick by magic, sucking, singing, or massaging, diagnose illnesses and prescribe magical remedies, and in general intercede between humans and the spirits in matters of health and sickness (photo 25).

Among the Yanomamö, only men become shamans. It is a status to which any man can aspire if he so chooses, and in some villages a large percentage of the men are shamans. They are called shabori or hekura in the Yanomamö language, the latter word also applying to the myriad of tiny humanoid spirits the shamans manipulate.

One must, however, train to be a shaman, as priests must in many religions. This entails a long period of fasting, a year or more, during which time the novice loses an enormous amount of weight. He may literally be skin and bones at the end. An older man or men instruct the novice in the attributes, habits, songs, mysteries, and fancies of the hekura spirits. During the period of fasting, the novice must also be sexually continent, for the hekura are said to dislike sex and to regard it as shami–filthy. The novices must attempt to attract particular hekura into their chests, a process that takes much time and patience, for the hekura are fickle and likely to leave a human host. The inside of a shaman’s body is thought to be a veritable cosmos of rivers, streams, mountains, and forests where the hekura can dwell in comfort and happiness. But only the more accomplished shamans have many hekura inside their bodies, and even they must strive to keep the hekura contented. Once a man is on good terms with his hekura, he can engage in sex without having his spirits abandon him. I sometimes suspect that the older men are putting one over on the younger men when they say that it is good to be a shaman and all of them should try it–and then telling them that they have to forsake women for an extended period of time. It is an effective way to reduce sexual jealousy, one of the chronic sources of social disruption in a village, and allow the older men more opportunities for copulation. Some young men have told me in confidence that they did not want to go through the shamanism training because of the sexual continence requirement.

There are hundreds–perhaps thousands– of hekura. They are all small, varying in size from a few millimeters to an inch or two for the really large ones. Around the heads of male hekura are glowing halos called wadoshe, a kind of palm-frond visor that the Yanomamö themselves sometimes wear. Female hekura have glowing wands sticking out of their vaginas. All the hekura are exceptionally beautiful, and each has his or her own habits and attributes. Most are named after animals, and most came into existence during some mythical episode that transformed an Original Being–one of the no badabo–into both an animal and its hekura counterpart. The hekura are said to be found in the hills or high in trees, often suspended there, but they can also live under rocks or even in the chest of a human. Many of them have special weapons for striking or piercing the soul. Some are physically hot and some are naiki–meat hungry cannibalistic. Some are both hot and meat hungry, and these are often the ones sent to devour the souls of enemies.

All the hekura have individual trails that they follow when their human hosts call to them. The trails lead from the sky or the mountains, or even from the "edge of the universe," to the human host’s body. There, the trail enters the feet of the human and traverses the body until it reaches the thoracic cavity, where the symbolic villages, forests, and mountains are found. The hekura come out of these mountains and lairs, reeling and dancing, glowing as they come, fluttering around in ecstasy, like a swarm of butterflies hovering over a food patch. Once they are in the body, they are subject to the designs of the human host, who sends them out to devour enemy souls–especially children’s souls–or to help the host cure sickness in his village.

The shamans have to take hallucinogenic snuff–ebene–to contact the spirits, but highly experienced shamans need very little. A pinch is enough to get them singing the soft, melodic, beautiful songs that attract the hekura spirits. Since the hekura require beauty, most shamans decorate their chests and stomachs with red nara pigment, don their best feathers, and make themselves attractive before they call to the hekura. The hekura have their own intoxicant, a magical beverage called braki aiamo uku, that they take when their human counterparts are snorting  ebene.

As the ebene takes effect, the shamans begin to sing louder and louder, often screaming, but always melodically and expertly. They recite the deeds of the hekura, the time of their creation, their songs and habits, and tell of many marvelous and fabulous events. Since this performance happens almost every day, most of the people in the village appear to be ignoring it, but, consciously or not, they are listening. Someone might interrupt to correct a slurred or inaccurate statement of "mystical truth," or to remind the shaman that he left out a particular gesture when he got to a certain point in his mythical account. This is generally the way stories of mythical times are circulated, and often just snippets of the story are told, but all know the whole story. Sometimes an inept younger man will take too much hallucinogen and "freak out," as if he had overdosed. Some men take ebene only because they like to get high and have no interest in trying to control the hekura. In the villages I lived in during the earlier years of my fieldwork, the men took ebene almost every day. More recently, I have lived in villages where its use is less common.

Taking ebene, which is noisy, exciting, and dramatic–but also unpleasant because of the vomiting and profuse discharges of green mucus–can sometimes be dangerous as well. The trances are often the occasion for a man to relieve any frustrations that might have been building up. The Yanomamö attitude seems to be that a man is not fully responsible for his acts when he is in communion with the hekura and high on ebene. One occasionally sees a timid man become boisterous and, at times, violent–running around in a stupor, wild-eyed, threatening to shoot someone with an arrow or hack someone with a machete.

I have always suspected that one of the primary functions of the daily ebene round is to give the men a quasi-acceptable means of working off their pent-up antagonisms and of showing, if only briefly, an intense emotion they might not otherwise be able to express. When a man becomes waiteri on drugs, the others pay attention to him, chase and disarm him, attempt to calm his temper, entreat him to calm down and stop being fierce. Mostly they allow their concerned peers to calm them, for they appear to be aware that they may carry things too far. But for a moment the timid can be fierce and can display a passion that they probably would not show when sober. Violations of some of the most stringent avoidance taboos are overlooked when the violator is intoxicated on ebene. For instance, a son-in-law can touch, talk to, or caress his father-in-law, something that would be unthinkable if both were sober. It is a sort of psychological release valve for the pent-up strains of a workday life.

But the ebene taking can get out of hand. In a village to the north of Kaobawa’s, a man intoxicated on ebene decapitated another with a single blow of his machete, precipitating a violent fission in the village and a long war between the two groups. In my estimation, it is not irrelevant that the decapitated man was a chronic opponent of his killer and that there was a long history of argumentation between them. I myself was nearly shot by a wild-eyed young tough high on ebene, a man with whom I had had a disagreement earlier in the day.

The Yanomamö cosmos, then, parallels and reflects the mortal world that humans know and dwell in. When the humans die, they repeat life elsewhere, in the cosmic layer above, hunting, collecting, gardening, making love, making war. In hedu as it is on earth.

These excerpts are from the fifth edition, of 1992, with a new subtitle replacing the phrase "the fierce people," as you can see.  In the year 2000 a book (Brian Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado) attacking Chagnon's dealings with the Yanomami created a very large fuss in the world of anthropology.  It looks like the book seriously misrepresents Chagnon's work, however.  Chagnon represents what is sometimes called the "scientific" (or "rationalist") approach to anthropology, where the purpose is to get the facts as objectively as possible, even if this means intruding upon matters that the people studied would rather not talk about or find insulting, and even if that means passing value judgments on some of the practices of this or that group.  The other wing of anthropology is more "humanistic" (or "romantic").  The goal of this approach is to appreciate a culture for its own sake, respecting its values and biases, supposedly without passing judgment on any of its aspects.  Anthropologists who favor the humanistic approach are nonetheless often inclined to portray primitive life as natural, sensible, humane, caring of the environment, and peaceful.  The portrayals by the scientific minded are more likely to describe both the good and the bad.  Chagnon rather aggressively argued against the romantic view and made a few enemies among anthropologists.  Tierney seems to be one of them.

(Students in the past have expressed surprise that there is so much of a focus on sex, both as a source of serious strife among people and as an object of constant bantering.  The students wondered whether sections about sex are over-represented here.  In fact, some of the sections that are omitted here, represented by four asterisks -- * * * * -- have even more about sex.  As always, the way to check on potential bias in these reading selections is to get the original and compare it to what has been excerpted here.)

Chagnon is pronounced  SHAG-nun.  Though his name is French, he was raised in Michigan where his name had an American pronunciation.